


Exile (It Takes Your Mind)

by lightningwaltz



Category: 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors - Fandom, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward - Fandom
Genre: Assisted Suicide, Codependency, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 20:25:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/613972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/pseuds/lightningwaltz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Speculation on what might have happened to Santa between 999 and Virtue's Last Reward. (The tags/warnings probably give away the content of this fic. And there are spoilers for a plot thread in VLR. So tread carefully!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exile (It Takes Your Mind)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a drabble based on the idea of Aoi getting infected with radical-6 (which isn't a spoiler or even super valid speculation at this point, this idea just became lodged in my head after freaking out about it with one of my friends a few weeks back. And I had to write this to get it out of my system.)

Some time around Akane's twentieth birthday she decides that she's going to poison herself if the nonary game runs aground. She has all possible futures classified, every outcomes memorized, and, statistically speaking, she's more likely to fail than succeed. She knows better than most that death and life can hinge on something as small as a choice between two different doors. 

Or a foolish sprint down a hallway.

All the same, that doesn't mean she'll meekly bow her head and succumb to immolation. She may have become the consummate sinner, but her child self doesn't deserve that sort of homicide. If fate is coming for her, if she is indeed meant to be a corpse, then she going to bite into a cyanide tablet and drift into the ether. She's not allowing Aoi to watch as she screams herself to death.

She starts to research her options. Lately she can fashion herself into being the best at anything, and that includes committing suicide. As is often the case, the results of her analysis aggravate her. It would seem that there are no truly painless poisons out there. It's as though the universe is saying, yes, death is final and permanent and any such loss must be marked with torment.

Akane doesn't know why this rule rebounds on the dying rather on murderers and torturers, but she doesn't make the rules, she merely upholds them.

_(One may say she's turned herself into the god of her Nonary Game. Only Aoi knows that, no, in that territory she is more bound and constrained that ever before.)_

It transforms her into a latter day alchemist. She won't find gold in her lab, but eventually- several years after her salvation comes and goes- she finds painless death in a test tube.

*

But it wasn't meant for Aoi. It was never meant for her older brother.

Yet here they are.

One day, decades from now, she'll know all the details of Radical-6. In this precise moment, however, people are dying, there is no cure, and the pandemic has sunk its claws into Aoi. He's turning into a pathogen occupying a familiar, beloved face, and that...

That is unacceptable. Surely anyone would agree?

They have him sedated, because there's no other option. Leave them alone, and the infected jump off buildings, or shoot themselves in the head. Tie them down and they bite off their tongues. Aoi, who is excessively clever when he is determined, is a disaster waiting to happen. It's only a matter of time before she stumbles across his bloody corpse.

Unless, she takes his arm, like she does now, and sticks the needle in. As the heart beat monitor stills, Akane thinks about how the equation between them is so wretchedly unbalanced. As children Aoi brought her Christmas presents, and as adults her gave her back her life.

Akane can only give him a peaceful death.

*

They find her soon after, curled up on her side in the hospital bed, next to her brother's body.

When she looks up, she's dry eyed. "We're stopping this disease somehow."

It's not a question.


End file.
